Sunday, January 28, 2018

One of the most challenging questions of faith that people have
is the question of suffering. This question comes in a variety of forms: Why do
bad things happen to good people? Why is God punishing me or my loved one? If God is good, why is
there so much evil in the world? If God is all-powerful, why didn’t God prevent
this terrible tragedy? How can we say God is loving if God lets such evil
things happen in the world? These are all variations of the same basic faith
questions about good, evil, suffering, and the nature of God. Wrestling with
these questions and getting nowhere is a stumbling block to the faith of many
who seek to be disciples of Jesus. It’s often very personal experiences that
bring us to the center of this struggle. You cannot get very far in this life
without experiencing for yourself or a loved one suffering that feels
senseless, baffling, and so hurtful you cannot imagine how or why you should
have to endure it. A loved one dies unexpectedly. A child faces an aggressive
illness. A community experiences tragic acts of violence. A natural disaster devastates
a nation. And we are left asking, “Why, God? Why do these things happen?”

In the wake of suffering, you’ll often hear people trying to
make sense of their experiences and their faith by offering the best reasons
they can come up with for what has happened. “It must have been the will of
God.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “God is just testing your faith.” “It
was just their time.” “God has a plan, and this is a part of God’s plan.” To
people who are suffering and grieving, these explanations are for the most part
incrediblyunsatisfying, and sometimes downright horrifying. The idea that God’s plan was for a child to die, God’s
will, or that a disaster occurred so that the rest of us could learn some
lesson from it: there’s not much comfort to be had there, and frankly, these explanations
make God seem pretty heartless. But we offer these ideas because we don’t know
what else to say, how else to explain things. Why do these things happen?
Why does God allow such suffering?

Answering these questions is the task of a field of theology
called theodicy. Theodicy is made of
two Greek words that mean God and justice, and in this case, we’re talking
about how we justify God – how do we
make the idea of an all-knowing and loving God fit with the sin, evil, and
suffering we experience in the world? Everything from the quick responses we
offer – “Everything happens for a reason” – to the deep theological treatises
written on these issues over the centuries are theodicies: our attempt to
understand how God and suffering work.

Even the biblical witness struggles with the question of God
and suffering. Today we heard a passage from the book of Job. We don’t know who
the author of the book of Job is, or exactly when it was written, but scholars
think it may be from the 6th century BCE. The story has two parts –
a frame, a beginning and ending of the book that are written in narrative form
– and the center section, long chapters of poetry. In the frame, we find God in
conversation with the “heavenly beings” of the “heavenly council.” This is
pretty foreign to us, but basically the book of Job envisions God and a bunch
of other angel-like beings that together look over what is happening on earth.
Included in this heavenly council is the Satan. In the book of Job, Satan isn’t
so much an evil figure as Satan is more like what we would call a “devil’s
advocate,” someone who offers provocative challenges to claims another makes.
God notes to Satan that there is a man named Job who is “blameless and
upright,” fearing God and turning from evil. But Satan counters that of course Job is blameless and upright,
because everything in Job’s life is going smoothly. He has blessings and family
and possessions. But, Satan counters – what if you took all that away? What if
Job was suffering? Surely then Job’s faith would fail. And so God says: Go
ahead, Satan. Let’s see. You can do anything you want to him except kill him.
And sure enough, soon, Job loses his property, and all of his children. At the
close of our text for today though we read that even still, “in all this, Job
did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.”

What follows, the poetry section of Job, is chapter after
chapter of arguments between Job and his “friend,” visitors who come to tell
him that surely he has done something wrong and is being punished, otherwise he
wouldn’t be suffering. Job keeps insisting that he’s blameless, but they are
sure that he needs to repent for wrongdoing. All the while, Job keeps insisting
that he just wants to talk to God and ask, “Why?” Finally, God responds, first
chastising Job’s friends for being pretty useless, and then answering Job by
saying something like: I’m God and you are just a mere human. Who are you to
question the way I, creator of the universe, work in the world? Job replies
sheepishly saying something like, “I’m sorry; you’re right, thanks for
answering me.” And then we’re back to the frame, and everything that was taken
away from Job is restored. He gets new kids and gets his lands back, and they
all live happily ever after! In the end, although Job is filled with beautiful
poetry about the awesomeness of God, Job is, in my opinion at least, pretty
unsatisfying if you’re looking for real answers about why we suffer. I don’t
believe that we experience pain and suffering because God is making bets with
the heavenly council on how much we can endure.

I do not believe that it is God’s will for us to suffer. I
don’t believe that God causes our
suffering. If we encountered a person who was intentionally planning to cause
harm, suffering, tragedy in the lives of those around them, we would consider
this person evil, or sick, or think that they needed to be imprisoned.[1]
How, then, could we believe that God, our creator and redeemer, would intend to
cause us harm? It doesn’t compute with anything I’ve learned of God’s love,
mercy and grace. So how can we make
sense of suffering?

In his book Why? Making
Sense of God’s Will, Adam Hamilton walks us through three key ideas that
help us answer this question.[2]
First, he says, God has given humans “dominion” over earth.[3]
More simply, that means that God has made us
responsible for what happens here. As we talked about last week, God’s way
of working in the world is usually by sending people to do God’s work. So when
we think about people who are hungry or in need of shelter or in need of
comfort: God works through us to
impact those problems.

Second, we have the ability to choose good from evil. We have
free will. Hamilton writes, “Have you ever wondered why, knowing that Adam and
Eve would eat of the tree, God put the tree there to begin with? God could have
left the tree out of the garden altogether, and Adam and Eve would never have
disobeyed. But the tree represents the freedom that God gives human beings to
choose God’s way or another way. God deemed the ability to choose to be an
essential part of human existence. We instinctively know how important our
freedom is to us. We are willing to fight and die for it. As children grow up,
they yearn for it. We know that we want another to choose to love us, not be
forced to love us. God’s decision to give human beings the ability to choose
right from wrong is itself an expression of God’s love.”[4]

And third, we find that we are drawn again and again to
things that aren’t God’s will. Our freedom, our free will, is a gift from God.
But when we misuse the gifts that God gives to us, our actions can lead to
suffering.[5]
When we think about suffering, we have to remember that God gives us
responsibility to take care of the earth and all that is in it, alongside God,
that God gives us freedom, given out of love for us, and that often, we take
God’s gift and instead misuse it, causing harm to ourselves and others.

Keeping these ideas in mind, we can
think about the suffering that we experience. Some suffering we experience is
from natural disaster, or widespread suffering like hunger and poverty. Science
can help us understand the mechanics of why some disasters occur. Earthquakes
happen when the earth’s plates move in certain ways. If they didn’t move, the earth
would be too hot for us to live on. Monsoons that bring devastating flooding
help regulate the temperature of the atmosphere, keeping it cool.[6]
Without these features, we could not live on planet earth, even though
sometimes they cause devastation that overwhelms us. We might not that much of
the suffering from natural disasters disproportionately impacts people who are
poor. We have to ask ourselves: why are the most vulnerable people always
living in such risky, disaster-vulnerable places? Here, we find opportunities
as God’s workers in the world to help alleviate suffering. We have to ask
ourselves about the privilege of wealth and how poverty places people at risk
and what we can do about it.

Some suffering is caused by human
decision – our decisions, and the decisions of others. Last week we talked
about not expecting God to answers our prayers if that would result in taking
away the free will of another person. That would be taking away God’s gift from
someone else in order to make what we want come true. This same issue of free
will comes into play when we talk about suffering. Hamilton writes, “What would
it look like if God restricted our freedom so that … tragedies didn’t happen?
What would your life look life if God made it impossible for you to ever do the
wrong thing? As much as we might wish for this, so that human beings would not
hurt one another, would we really like the results? … If we have no choices,
and we only always do God’s will, we cease to be human and become puppets …
Part of the risk God took in giving us freedom is that we might and probably
will misuse that freedom to do the very things that would break God’s heart.”[7]
Sometimes we think that we want God to keep us, or keep others, from exercising
their free will if their free will results in suffering for people we love. But
I don’t believe that we really want to be puppets. Why would God create us and
all that we know only to decide everything for us? What would be the point of
our existence, or the point of relationship with God, if we weren’t learning
and growing and living and choosing? Sometimes, the results of our choosing
break our hearts, and break God’s heart too. But God won’t take the gift of
decision from us, and even when it hurts, I’m thankful for that.

Some suffering we experience in the
form of sickness, disease, cancer. God does not desire for us to be sick and
suffering. I grieve, and I believe God grieves with us, when life is cut short
from disease that we don’t yet understand how to heal, or when new diseases
emerge in our ever changing world. Jesus was known as a healer. It was a
priority of his ministry, healing people. And God gives us amazing abilities to
heal and recover and be resilient through so many things. And God gives us
brilliant minds, physicians and nurses and researchers who work so diligently
to seek new paths for healing.

Suffering will always be a part of
our human experience. In fact, Jesus repeatedly reminds the disciples that their
choosing to follow God would undoubtedly result in more suffering in their
lives, not less, because their unwavering commitment to God’s path and to
speaking God’s truth would make them the enemies of many who were choosing
paths other than God’s. When we choose discipleship, when we choose to throw in
our lot with God, and with the vulnerable, with the poor, with those on the
fringes, with those who have no one else to stand for them, when we choose to
speak the truths that no one wants to hear, we will put ourselves in the path
of suffering.

But we find that God is on that path
with us. Jesus walks the path of suffering. Our forerunners in faith walked
this path. In our reading from Romans, Paul says that nothing, not life, not
death, or anything in between can separate us from God’s love. Nothing. Strengthened
by that knowledge, I trust that God can take the broken pieces of our
suffering, and draw forth new life. I believe that God can use us to alleviate suffering, if we are
willing to serve God and one another with our whole hearts. And when we are mired
in grief and pain, I believe that God is with us there, too, suffering with us, never, ever abandoning us. I
don’t know that we can every fully understand the suffering of the world. I
cling to the words of the old hymn, “We’ll Understand It Better By and By,” and
long for the day when such things will be clearer to me. But in the meantime, I
trust in what I do know: God created us, loves us unconditionally and
eternally, and never forsakes us. “If God is for us, who is against us?” Thanks
be to God. Amen.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Are you a praying person? Do you feel like God answers your
prayers? Have some of your prayers gone unanswered? As a young teen, I
experienced the most powerful sense that my prayers meant something to date. I
was at Camp Aldersgate, attending Senior High Creative Arts Camp. Our director,
Bobbi, was pregnant, in her first trimester. She was a bit older than a “typical”
first time parent, although honestly I say that from my teenage perspective –
I’m not sure how old she was really, and I’m sure she was younger than I am
now. But I know she was very anxious about the pregnancy. And while we were at
camp, she experienced some spotting, and she had to leave to go to the hospital
and get checked out, and it was clear, she was distraught and fearful. We were
a small group of Creative Arts campers that week, and we pulled together, and
we prayed, and prayed, and prayed for Bobbi and her baby. And when Bobbi came
back from the hospital all smiles and announcing with tears in her eyes that
everything was ok, I felt so completely: God has heard our prayers and answered
them. My faith was so strengthened by that experience.

But what about those who have prayed a similar prayer only to
face tragedy? I’ve certainly experienced loss and grief despite praying for
healing. What about the prayers we share with God that express our deepest
hopes and desires, and yet what we’ve asked for doesn’t come to fruition?
Sometimes it seems that God answers our prayers, and sometimes it feels like
God is silent. What’s the rhyme and reason at work here when it comes to
prayer? Why does it seem like God doesn’t always answer our prayers?

And doesn’t God say that God will answer our prayers if we’re
faithful in our asking? The scriptures seem to point to this idea in more than
one place in Jesus’ teaching. Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith
and do not doubt … even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown
into the sea,’ it will be done. Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you
will receive.” (Matthew 21:21-22) That seems pretty clear, right? Whatever we ask for in faith, we’ll get,
right? In our text today, in the conclusion of his response to the disciples
asking Jesus to teach them to pray, Jesus says, “So I say to you, Ask, and it
will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be
opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches
finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” There is it again
– ask, and you’ll receive! Everyone who asks receives! And yet, I know you must
be able to immediately think, as I can, of prayers I’ve offered to God where
what I was seeking never came to fruition, and what happened seemed to be the
opposite of what I asking for.

What do we make of this then? Is the Bible wrong? Is Jesus not telling us the truth
about prayer? Or, is there something wrong with us? Is there some sin in our
life that is causing God to refuse to answer our prayers? Are we not praying
hard enough? Often, people point to these kinds of explanations – blaming the
pray-er – when prayers are unanswered. But telling a parent that their prayers
for their sick child weren’t enough or weren’t right somehow seems heartless
and wrong and contrary to the very nature of our God who is love. So what,
then? Why doesn’t God answer our prayers, when the Bible seems to insist that
God will give us what we ask for?

In his book Why?:
Making Sense of God’s Will, Adam Hamilton suggests that when Jesus’
teachings in the Bible don’t match up with what we know from our life
experience, perhaps what is at work is “our
failure to understand what Jesus meant” by a certain teaching.[1]
So what aren’t we getting about Jesus’ teachings on prayer? Hamilton writes “One
of the features of hyperbole is that what is said is not logically possible, so
that the hearer knows it is a figure of speech. You can see this in our own use
of hyperbole. When a person says he is ‘so hungry I could eat a horse,’ we
don’t scratch our heads and say, ‘That’s terrible, you shouldn’t eat horses!’
We understand by the nature of the statement that he is saying he is hungry.
And when one of my daughters in middle school said, ‘Dad, if that boy comes to
talk to me, I’ll just die,’ I didn’t call the paramedics to be on standby just
in case the boy tried to speak to my daughter.”

He continues, “I suggest that Jesus’ hearers understood that
Jesus was speaking hyperbolically when he said, ‘Whatever you ask for in prayer
with faith, you will receive’ … They did not think he was suggesting they could
pray for wealth and have it, or that they could pray for the Romans to leave,
and they would be gone. They did not think he was saying, ‘Pray for world
peace,’ and it would instantly happen. Or that if they only prayed with faith
all of their problems would magically disappear or be resolved. I think they
understood that Jesus was saying, ‘Go to God with your burdens! Be bold when
you pray! Trust that God hears your prayers! And, in ways you don’t fully
understand, God will see you through this situation you face.’” (38-39) Hear
that again: “Go to God with your burdens! Be bold when you pray! Trust that God
hears your prayers! And, in ways you don’t fully understand, God will see you
through this situation you face.” Like Hamilton, I believe that this gives us a
good sense of what Jesus is telling us about prayer. Jesus isn’t trying to tell
us that prayer is like giving God our shopping list and expecting God to
deliver everything on the list. Instead, Jesus wants to encourage us to be
completely open and honest with God in our prayers, trusting that God is
listening.

Why, though,
doesn’t God just give us what we ask for? Let’s think about that together. First,
think about the challenges that would arise if God wanted to say, “Sure, no
problem,” to all of our prayer requests. Have you seen the 2003 Jim Carrey
movie Bruce Almighty? In one scene, Carrey’s
character, Bruce, who gets to take on all God’s power and responsibilities for
a brief time, is answering all the prayer requests that come to God. They
arrive in email form, and Bruce thinks it will be so easy to do this part of
the job. He decides to simply reply “yes” to every prayer request. You’d think that would be great, right?
Everyone’s requests to God answered with a “yes, sure, whatever you want!” But
in the film, when everyone gets a “yes,” the results bring total chaos. For
example, everyone who prays to win the lottery does – but since so many people win, everyone gets only $1 or so,
and everyone is livid. Or, what if two people have applied for the same job,
and are both praying that God will give them the new position? Whose prayer
should God answer with a yes? I think of the sincere prayers I offered as a
young person of faith, including an occasional prayer that the current boy of
my dreams might in fact turn out to be “the one.” What if God had said “yes” to
some of those prayers, when sixth months later, I didn’t feel the same way? And
what about what those boys had wanted? Should God have made them fall for me, just because that was what I wanted? Not if
we actually value the precious gift of free will that God gives us! Or what if
I pray to pass my math test, even though I haven’t studied? Is it helpful for
God to say “yes” to these prayers, and set a pattern where we never bother to
learn these skills on our own?[2]
Sometimes, we must admit that we’re eventually thankful that God didn’t say
“yes” to all of our wants. Sometimes, my new prayer is “thank goodness you
didn’t force what I was asking for to take place.” Sometimes, we have to
acknowledge that the only way God could answer our prayer is by taking away free will from someone else. And
sometimes, we have to admit that our prayers are really requests for us to get
what we want without working hard, striving toward goals, and using the gifts
and tools God has already put into our hands.

I think God also works within the
natural order, the rhythm and law of the universe most of the time. Hamilton
writes, “When God wants something done, god typically sends people. This has
led me to conclude that God’s customary way of working in our lives is through
what appears to be ordinary means. Rather than suspending the law of nature
that God created to do God’s work, God typically works through natural laws and
through people … Can God miraculously intervene in answer to our prayers to
protect us from harm? Yes, but God’s normal way of working is found within the
natural laws God establish and in human beings to whom God gave responsibility
for tending this planet on God’s behalf.”[3]
Most of the time, outside of miraculous occurrences that are by definition
rare, God works within the patterns of the universe that God has created, which
means that sometimes our prayers, which would require breaking and bending the
order of the universe to fulfill, don’t get answered as we want.

What I do believe, what the
scriptures show, is that God never abandons
us, even when God does not answer our prayers in the ways we seek. In fact, God
gets right in our despair with us, experiences heartbreak and grief with us,
walks beside us in the dark valleys, even coming to us in the person of Jesus
to be closer to us and our experiences. God never
abandons us, ever. And God takes the pain and sorrow we experience and draws
new life even from the hardest moments in our lives. We’ll think more about
that together next week.

So, if God doesn’t promise to give
us everything we want, and God might have many good reasons for not saying
“yes” to our prayer requests, and God doesn’t often intervene in the natural
order of the universe to make things happen the way we want them to, why bother
praying? Why does Jesus emphasize how persistent we should be in prayer? What’s
the point? This is when our thinking of
God as a parent is so helpful to me. You know my mom and I are very close. She
knows my heart pretty well, and knows my hopes and dreams. She can’t always
make want I want take place. She can’t fulfill every wish I’ve expressed. And
certainly, she wouldn’t, even if she could, if you think about all my hopes
over the years and the times that she knew better than I what would be
meaningful in my life. Does that mean there’s no point in me sharing my heart
with her? Does that mean she doesn’t want to know about what I want? Of course
not! Of course, my mom wants to know everything about me, anything I’m willing
to share with her. She wants to know about my hopes and dreams because she
loves me, and sharing like this is a part of building a relationship, part of
building trust and compassion. And the relationship brings me comfort,
strength, and encouragement. That’s what God wants with us: to be in
relationship with us, to have us pour our hearts out to God, to shower us with
love and encouragement, to have us get to know God deeply, and be known by God
deeply, to be comforted and strengthened by the constancy of our relationship.
Prayer is our way of building relationship with God.

Prayer is also about listening to
God – we talked about that last week. We pray so that we signal to God and to
ourselves that we’re listening and ready to hear what God has to say to us.
Prayer is not so much about changing God as it is sometimes about changing us.
In the words we call the Lord’s Prayer, a version of which appears in our text
today, Jesus encourages the disciples to pray about forgiveness, to pray to
learn to not hold things against each other, to pray for daily sustenance
rather than food to store up, to pray for God’s way and God’s realm to be the
way of earth rather than our own way and will. Essentially, Jesus guided the
disciples to pray not that God would give them what they wanted, but that they
might be transformed into the servants of God that Jesus knew they could be.
Prayer changes us, because it helps
us tune our hearts to God. It helps us remember that God has placed into our
hands already the tools and resources and gifts and abilities to be the answers
to the prayers we’re praying, to be the agents of transformation in the world
we long for. Prayer changes us, and
so we pray because it opens us to the work of God in our lives.

I want to encourage you to think
about your discipline of prayer. I have found keeping a prayer journal to be a
helpful reminder of God’s faithfulness: recording prayer requests and looking
back over time to see how God has been at work. Rarely does God seem to act in
the ways I expect or ask. But always, God is at work, drawing life and hope and
good out of everything. And always, God is with me, and with those I have
lifted up to God.

Friends, Jesus tells us to ask,
search, and knock at God’s door. I don’t think he tell us this so that God can
check everything off our wish list, or so
that we can make fools of ourselves praying prayers that will never be
answered. Rather, I think when we ask, God does give, even when what God gives is unexpected. I think when we
search, we do find, even when what we find is not the original destination we
were seeking. And I think when we knock, God always opens the door for us that leads to a deeper faith, a closer
relationship with God, and a changed heart for us. And so we ask, with the
disciples: Lord, teach us to pray. Amen.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Why: Why doesn’t God speak to us like God
speaks to people in the Bible?

Today we’re beginning a new sermon
series called “Why: Asking Tough Questions of Faith.” Each week, we’ll be
exploring together one of the faith questions that seems to be a question that
many people had, questions that I’ve heard throughout my ministry, questions
that Christians have struggled with for generation upon generation. We’ll
wrestle with these questions together, and see what we can learn from the
scriptures, from God’s direction, from our experiences, and from each other. I
have to warn you right at the start that I can’t promise to give the answer to these questions we’ll
wrestle with. If they were easy questions to answer, they wouldn’t be questions
that people have wrestled with over centuries. But we’ll do our best to be
thoughtful and inquisitive and turn to our best sources of wisdom as we try to
find God’s voice, God’s direction when it comes to challenging faith questions.
Sometimes people get anxious when it comes to questioning and faith, fearing
that expressing doubt or confusion or concern is a sign of a weak faith. But I
feel strongly that asking questions about faith is a sign of strength. It’s a
sign that we’re exploring and struggling and searching, and I think that our
searching is what leads to growing in faith. So together, we’ll question,
search, and hopefully grow together as we explore.

Today, we’re starting with this question: Why doesn’t God
speak to us now like God seems to speak to people in the Bible? This is one of
the questions I’ve been asked regularly throughout my years as a pastor. After
all, in the scriptures, we read about God speaking out from a burning bush, or
God walking through the garden where Adam and Eve lived, or speaking from an
overshadowing cloud, or Moses speaking with God on the mountaintop, so in the
presence of God’s holiness that Moses’ face is glowing – all these very
dramatic ways of getting someone’s attention. Then, even when there are not
appearances of God in these dramatic forms, instead, there are dramatic
appearances of angels: the heavenly host singing of Jesus’ birth to the
shepherds, Jacob wrestling with an angel all night long, angels telling of
Jesus’ resurrection to the women at the tomb. And yet, I’ve encountered very
few people who have said that they have heard God’s voice in direct, clear way,
or experienced angels in dazzling white. So why doesn’t God speak with us like
this anymore?

Today’s scripture text from Genesis is a great example. In
chapter 11 of Genesis, we find a long record of genealogy, and the first
mention of a man named Abram, who with his wife Sarai and some of his extended
family settles in a region called Haran, a place in present-day Turkey. We
don’t know anything else about Abram at this point. And then as chapter 12
begins, it starts with these words: “Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your
country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show
you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your
name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you,
and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the
earth shall be blessed.”” The next verse tells us, “So Abram went, as the Lord
had told him.” And I think, of course he did! Of course Abram did what God said
– because what God said was clear and direct and unambiguous! When Abram gets
to where he can look into the land of Canaan that God has promised, the text
tells us that Abram builds and altar to God “who had appeared to him.” We don’t
know any details about how God appears to Abram, but the point for us is that
God did appear. And again, I think:
Of course, if God just appeared to
me, I would be able to hear what God was saying and know what I was supposed to
do. So what’s changed? Does God not speak in the same way anymore? And if not,
why not?

I think when it comes to hearing God speaking to us, there
are a few things we can think about to help us understand why it seems like
things are so different. First, I think what we perceive as a difference in how
God acts in the world often might actually be a difference in how we speak
about our experiences, how we use language, how we describe events. Our
language is different today than it was in the Bible. We understand the mind
differently, and we have different ways to express how people experience the
world around them. For example, the field of psychology has given us lots of
ways to speak about what goes on in our minds. We can speak about our
conscience and our subconscious. That we might engage in thoughts and behaviors
that we’re not really even aware of in the moment, or that we might have moral
wrestling in our mind, as we struggle to determine the right course of action –
I don’t find these themes anywhere in the scripture, because we didn’t study these concepts, find a way to
describe them, until much, much
later. So, we don’t read: Abram and his family started feeling like perhaps
they should move to a new place, and that God might bless them in new ways if
they moved, and this idea just kept tugging at them, and they weighed all the
pros and cons, and finally decided that they needed to take a risk and that
yes, God was with them in their decision, yes, God was leading them to a new
land. Instead, we read: God spoke, and Abram went. Maybe, though, if the
authors of Genesis were contemporaries of ours, they’d use different language,
different metaphors, to describe how God spoke to Abram.

Another reason I think it seems like God speaks to us
differently is because we are different
and so we’re expecting different things from God. Here’s what I mean: I’ve
shared with some of you before that part of the process of becoming ordained in
The United Methodist Church includes undergoing a psychological assessment. For
part of this, you have to answer a survey with hundreds of questions that then
get processed to assess your mental fitness for ministry. A repeated question
on the tests appearing in multiple different ways is something like: “Do you
hear voices telling you what to do?” The expected answer is, of course, “No!”
But I always found this to be a fascinating question for potential clergy to
answer. We speak all the time about feeling called by God, about God speaking
to us. But we also have this clear sense that “hearing voices” in the way we
often use that phrase today is a potential sign of a mental illness. If I
started “hearing voices,” my first thought would not be that God was speaking to
me. I might think I was being pranked or that there was a scam, a trick being
played on me. And if that wasn’t the solution, I’d start to wonder, seriously, about
my mental health. I’d go to the doctor. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.
And so, if I am not likely to respond positively to God speaking in this way –
if I’m more likely to doubt and question than trust and act, why would God try
to get a message to me like this? I think God is pretty wise, and so God is
wise enough to speak in ways we can hear. I think about how we send out meeting
reminder messages from the church office. Usually, we send emails. But not
everyone has email, and over time we’ve learned that some people who
technically have email never actually
check their email. How much sense
would it make for us to keep emailing someone about a meeting when we know that they are never going to see
the message? In the same way, why would God keep sending us messages that we
aren’t going to hear?

Finally, I think sometimes God is speaking, but we’re just not hearing it, not listening, not
recognizing God’s voice for what it is. We’ll be talking more about God and
prayer next week, but I’m reminded of the illustration that talks about a
person trapped in their home, praying for rescue from a flood. They’re
convinced God will save them. A person comes by in a truck, and another in a
boat to help, and finally in a helicopter, all trying to rescue the person, who
keeps refusing help because they’re waiting for God to save them. When the person
meets God face to face, and wonders why God didn’t save them from the flood, God
explains that God sent help three times, only to be refused. I wonder,
sometimes, if God is speaking to us in different ways, but we’re so focused on
our plan of what we think will happen, how we think God will act, that we can’t
see God right in front of us, calling our name.

So, how is God
speaking to you? How have you heard
God in your life? As a pastor, I’ve had lots of practice talking about my “call”
to ministry. I can say that God “called me” to be a pastor, but that simple
sentence doesn’t reflect the long struggle of trying to figure out what God was
leading me to do. But since part of becoming a pastor includes being able to
share my sense of call again and again, I’ve had more practice than many of you
in thinking about how God speaks to me. I can tell you that I went through a
period of time when I was sure I wanted to do anything but go to seminary, even though I wanted to find a way to serve God
with my life. But lots of people that I trusted and looked up to kept asking me
whether I had thought about seminary, whether I had thought about becoming a
pastor. There was no single moment where I heard God’s booming voice telling me
to be a preacher. But there were so many little moments of people pointing me
in the direction of answering God’s call.

After I started on that journey, when I was in college and
visiting seminaries, I had narrowed it down to two choices: Wesley Seminary in
Washington, DC, or Drew Theological School in Madison, NJ. After weighing the
choices, I settled on Drew, and began sharing the news with folks in my
childhood church. One woman there was Bertha Holmes, the widow of a United
Methodist pastor. I, along with everyone else in the congregation, deeply
admired her spirituality and strong faith. When I shared my choice with Bertha,
she said: “Oh, I prophesied that you would go to Drew.” I’d never heard Bertha
say anything like this before. She was more quiet and contemplative than
someone I would call “a prophet” who made declarations about what she knew
would be. And perhaps because of this, her words were all the more powerful. I
immediately felt content with the choice I had made. If Bertha prophesied that
I would go to Drew, to Drew I would go. I strongly believe that God was
speaking to me through Bertha.

And I’ve told you before of the vivid dream I had about my
late grandfather, Millard Mudge. There wasn’t much to the dream other than
Grandpa looking healthy and whole and giving me a big hug, and me telling him,
“I have missed you so much,” and it all feeling so very real that I woke up
with tears in my eyes. I don’t think God is speaking to me in all my crazy
dreams, but I do think that God was at work in this one, bringing me comfort,
and an abiding peace knowing that my grandfather was well in God’s eternal care.

How has God spoken to you? How can we make it easier for God
to speak to us? I think we can learn from our forbearers in the scriptures.
They had no doubt that God would speak to them, and so they seemed to be ready
to listen and respond. Can you cultivate your trust in God by studying the
scriptures, by praying regularly, by listening more? If you are interested in
exploring more deeply God’s call for your life, I also have resources I can
share with you, tools for discernment, for figuring out what God wants you to do.
Talk to me, and together we can find some practices that will help you listen
for God’s voice. I think we can be on the lookout for God’s messengers: that’s
the literal meaning of the word “angel.” If other people keep suggesting that
you take a certain path, if they keep telling you that they see a certain gift
or strength in you, it just might be that God is speaking to you through them.
Will you listen? And when you’ve heard God’s voice, whether you hear God’s
voice from the burning bush, or you hear God in the persistent tug of your subconscious,
will you claim you call? Will you respond? Will you answer?